Old boys on film

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Fashions come around again and so have Duran Duran, but don't
mention the new romantics or get them started on critics, writes
Michael Dwyer.

It's frightening to look back on a decade of your life and
realise it's mostly a loop of pop videos. My 1980s memories are a
mental scrapbook of bizarre glamour images that have nothing to do
with my real life. Whatever that may have been.

Duran Duran loom large in this artificial memory bank. The puffy
blouses and UFO hairstyles of Planet Earth. The
boxing-ring swimsuit models in Girls On Film. The luxury
yacht lark that was Rio .

Then there's that epic trilogy of adventure videos shot in Sri
Lanka by Russell Mulcahy. After the people's liberation that was
punk, the swashbuckling lads in Hungry Like the Wolf were like
raiders of the new videocracy, restoring power to the fashion elite
and trampling the peasants who couldn't afford stylists.

Simon Le Bon reclines like a cat in the executive club of a
five-star Melbourne hotel, a look of outrage slowly dawning on his
tanned, smouldering, 46-year-old face.

"You know how much that cost us, the whole Sri Lanka trip?" he
demands. No.

"Guess. Go on, have a guess, have a guess."

I don't ...

"No, have a guess, a real, honest guess. Go on."

Two million pounds?

"No, lower."

Four pounds and some change?

Keyboard player Nick Rhodes, still smashing in a considered
ensemble of black pop-art T-shirt and cream linen jacket, creases
his make-up with a smile.

Blimey, cheap as chips. But after all those cheap, new-wave
videos, was it not something of a reversion to the Rod Stewart
image of superstar affluence and privilege?

we've always appealed to girls, and mostly critics have been male. I think that's been somewhat of a hurdle.Nick Rhodes

LeBon is aghast. "Jesus!"

"Not at all," says Rhodes. "I think they represented
adventure."

"The boat thing was definitely the closest we got to that,"
LeBon says. "But I don't think it was elitist. It was like, 'Hey,
look at this! This is fantastic!' And it was something nobody had
seen.

"It was just about images. I mean, you watch a P. Diddy video,
you watch a rap video of one of those super-yachts, with the black
dancing girls - that's elitist, that's about bling, that's about,
'I've made the move up.'"

"I guess the videos became fairly iconic later," Rhodes
concedes. "But when we did them, we did them just as a little film
to go with the song. We thought they'd last for six weeks at best.
But the amount of analysis that ..."

"Riiiight!" LeBon gasps. "People read too much into this
shit!"

It's fair to say that this interview hasn't gone terribly well
in parts. It started on the wrong foot, when I took a gamble of
describing Duran Duran's comeback single, (Reach Up For The)
Sunrise, as a boring song with excellent hit potential.

For some reason, I felt that LeBon and Rhodes, who have remained
Duran Duran through thick and thin for 25 years, would have enjoyed
a sense of irony about their lofty position in the pop firmament -
the press has always been biased against their puffy-bloused
yachting ways, after all, and yet the band have enjoyed a
vindication to the tune of 70 million records.

Instead of rising to the bait, however, LeBon stood up and
walked to the far side of the room to sample a platter of cheeses.
It would be at least five minutes before he looked at me again.
Rhodes flinched slightly, as if he'd been slapped. I mean, the song
is distinctively Duran Duran, I was forced to elaborate feebly.
Duran Duran fans will, er, love it.

Good-cop Rhodes replied at last. "Well, good. I'd much rather
provoke an opinion. In the past, sure, we've never been a critics'
favourite. But then we've always appealed to girls, and mostly
critics have been male. I think that's been somewhat of a
hurdle."

A small one, though. Duran Duran made a spectacular live
comeback last year when John Taylor, Roger Taylor and Andy Taylor
rejoined LeBon and Rhodes for the first time since Live Aid. They
sold out venues from Tokyo to Los Angeles and then added box-office
grease to Robbie Williams' Australian tour in December.

But nostalgia will always be nostalgia. An album of new Duran
Duran songs - Astronaut is out this week - may be anything at all,
from the multimillion-selling glory days of their 1981 debut to the
nadir of 1990's Liberty. The earlier period, under the slightly
prickly circumstances, seems like a good one to dwell on.

LeBon remembers the day in April 1980 that he met the rest of
Duran Duran. The penniless drama student in post-punk Birmingham
turned up to audition at a hip warehouse nightclub called the Rum
Runner.

"It scared me a little bit at first, that they had such drive
and motivation," he says. "I came out of the punk scene, so I was
used to street cred, doing things for the sake of art. I remember
John saying to me, 'Street credibility, Simon? We've got about as
much street credibility as Chanel No.5.' They wanted to be the
biggest band in the world."

And they were, near as damn it. And then they weren't, as is the
fate of many pop groups that wear fashionable fragrances and appeal
to young ladies. But Duran Duran are unrepentant about the emphasis
on style that defined the MTV revolution, and arguably led to
medium-term shortcomings in the substance department of Pop
Inc.

"The whole of the '80s was about standing out," Rhodes says
simply. "The '90s was about blending into the crowd."

"Yeah," LeBon sneers, appalled by the grunge and DJ catastrophes
that made him redundant. "You decide which one you wanna be.
Really!"

"This is not a band filled with shrinking violets," Rhodes
chuckles through his lipstick.

"It wasn't so much the anti-star thing of the '90s," LeBon adds,
"it was the false modesty that really got me."

Strangely, though, when the term new romantic is mentioned, as
it must be, LeBon is keen to distance himself from the whole
frilly-cuffed ordeal.

"I'd seen it in the NME," he says. "There was an article about
Spandau Ballet and I'd seen the phrase 'new romantic', and I
thought, I like that, I'll have that. So I stuck it in a song
(first single Planet Earth) and suddenly we were in it!"

"We actually consciously avoided getting dragged into it," says
Rhodes, "because when things are incredibly fashionable, they go
out of fashion just as quick."

But really, chaps. You say new romantic to anyone over 30 and
the name Duran Duran is likely to come up.

"Sure," LeBon concedes. "We're the only survivors of new ro ...
of that thing. But Steve Strange, I mean, he was the archetype. And
Spandau, they embraced it much more than we did. They wore f---ing
tartan, for God's sake! Not a checked shirt in this band,
ever."

Who knows, this cunning fashion sense may have been the making
of Duran Duran. Even as their general popularity fell in the
ostensibly anti-star '90s, they held onto fans in high places.
Courtney Love covered Hungry Like the Wolf when Hole were at their
peak. The Smashing Pumpkins dragged LeBon on stage in 1998, and
Puff Daddy sampled Notorious in 2000.

The Dandy Warhols also paid homage on their last album, partly
produced by Rhodes, and Scotland's Franz Ferdinand are part of a
whole new wave of hip rock bands not averse to a synthetic bubble
skirt flashback.

"Powderfinger!" LeBon shouts. "They did a cover of The
Chauffeur !"

The all-Australian tribute album of 1999, Undone, also featured
Kylie Minogue, the Living End, Jebediah, Something For Kate and Ben
Lee. It was one of several around that time.

"You know," says Rhodes, "it's always great when other artists
get into your music and say nice things about you, because you know
that they understand what you go through. When you put things out
there that are very different, you're on the edge and you don't
know which way it's gonna go.

"And when we did the Thankyou album," he adds, bravely speaking
of their seldom-bought covers collection of 1995, "it did get the
most dreadful reviews."

LeBon laughs fit to burst.

"But you know what? Every single artist without exception said
great things about the versions that we did. Even Led Zeppelin! And
we took on some serious things, from Bob Dylan to Public Enemy to
... to ..."

To Lou Reed and Grandmaster Flash.

"And that was why it got the panning from the press!" LeBon
hoots. "How dare they do that to my favourite song?" He sobs into
his sleeve, exactly like an offended music critic.

A reunion was the obvious choice for the Fab Five. Astronaut is
only their fourth album together, the first since the sagely titled
Seven and the Ragged Tiger had everyone from Andy Warhol to
Princess Di to Bob Geldof to the James Bond movie people on the
phone.

"The first day we got (back) together and plugged in, three
years ago, we didn't play any old songs, we went straight into
something new," says Rhodes. "It went really well, so that's when
we knew it was gonna be worth doing for us, to make something
really creative out of it.

"But the music business was in absolute free-fall. Every time we
started to talk to someone about a record, the CEO would get fired.
One time we went in to sign a deal and the company was gone!
Incredible!"

Hence last year's tour. Highly convincing box-office figures
eventually attracted more serious attention, ultimately in the
corridors of Sony Music.

"As soon as we started playing," LeBon says, "it crystallised
the passion in the band, and when that happened, suddenly people
who were in charge of record companies - however briefly - they
really started to sit up.

"The thing is, we're survivors," he concludes. "It doesn't
matter how much shit you throw at us, it doesn't stick."

So far, so good. And speaking of metaphors, what's with
Astronaut?

"We've made this guy," LeBon says with exaggerated enthusiasm,
"and we've put all our energy into it and we're sending it out
there to see what it comes back with."